Feb 20, 2014

Back in the day, we could code up the firmware for a micro controller and store all of the device initialization and application code in ROM. Naturally, we’d transfer the code to RAM for speed-of-execution. However, today’s SoCs bring many more capabilities than a humble micro controller ever could, and SoCs consume less power every day. So, the burden placed on software developers has been turned up a notch.

Feb 16, 2014

A customer shared some empirical results from boundary-scan testing of the Intel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) nets on their design. These nets cannot be covered using In-Circuit Test (ICT), and some short-circuit and open-circuit defects defy detection using conventional functional test. What did they find?

Feb 02, 2014

In previous blogs, we contrasted the use of oscilloscopes to perform signal integrity validation (SIV) against silicon embedded instruments for system marginality validation (SMV). Why is SMV superior?